


these are the consequences of being chosen, my dear

by debeauharnais



Category: Lost
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Long Shot, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, anyway i love him so much and all the others deserve the world xx, this literally spans his early childhood to his death 900 years after the finale. we love to see it, you hear that? that's the sound of the benjamin linus protection squad pulling into the station
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:40:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28890018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/debeauharnais/pseuds/debeauharnais
Summary: The Island whispers to him, calls him words like important, and special, and king.It cradles him in his dreams, heals all his bruises him with gentle water and warm earth and birdsong, and he thinks, 'this must be what it’s like to have a mother.'He’s never loved anything the way he loves it.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	these are the consequences of being chosen, my dear

**Author's Note:**

> oh my gosh. okay, i started this fic back in 2019 and i've had it collecting dust on my laptop for the better part of two freaking years. when i went to read it through a week or so ago, it was all complete - except for this one bit where i'd just written [EDIT HERE] with a chunk of dialogue missing. so shout out to 2019 me!! i haven't watched lost in long enough that my memory was a little rusty, but i think i managed to piece together what i was trying to say :') 
> 
> i also tried to do this thing where ben's name is never mentioned in the narration, so if you're ever confused by who the 'he' in question is, it's likely ben <3
> 
> this is a rough pairing to my other alex-centric fic, so check that out if you like! it also relies a little on a theory i posted to the wikia [here!](https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Benjamin_Linus/Theories#The_fertility_problems_were_punishment_for_Ben.27s_leadership) (theories 9-12 are all mine as well so if you wanna nerd out, u know what to do lol ♡) i also rambled a bunch about ben being an outsider within the others [here](https://sta.sh/02g3rufc05xx), so if you want even more content after this and also wanna delve a little deeper into my personal character analysis of him, have at it!! 
> 
> enjoy my loves!! x

He has nannies when he’s little. Always young, always blonde, all tight-waisted skirts and red lips and soft smiles. They call him pretty words like “special” and “exceptional”, and don’t ask questions when he flinches away from gentle touches and raised hands. They read him bedtime stories of pilgrimages and discoveries and heroes borne of nothing, and bring him books from the library that he doesn’t really think are meant for children, books with long Latin words and pictures of trees and flowers and frogs. They don’t mind when he doesn’t speak much, don’t call him ugly words like “ungrateful” and “selfish” when he answers them with shy, uncertain smiles in the place of words, don’t roll their eyes when he finally breaks his silence and babbles about hot air balloons and ancient diseases and pulls leaves he found on the ground from his satchel. They’re patient. He likes that.

He doesn’t know how his father can afford it, doesn’t know where the money comes from, or why they have to eat cold dinners in aluminium trays and shiver under blankets in winter if they have enough to hire pretty women from expensive academies. He’s self-conscious about his home, sometimes, about the old beer cans and dirty dishes and frayed threads on their couch; it doesn’t seem right, he thinks numbly, for ladies with hairspray in their curls and paint on their fingernails to exist in the same space as all this gloom and sweat and stained carpet. He always waits for them to say something, watches their faces from under his lashes for any sign of disgust or disdain, expects them to lay down a handkerchief before they sit, or cough behind their hands, or wrinkle their noses at the dust on the picture frames and the powdery sunlight filtering through the drawn curtains. But they don’t. They just smile, and take his hand, and ask if he’s had breakfast yet. He never has. His room is always clean and tidy. They seem to like it there. 

But he sees them, sometimes, when he ought to be asleep. The first one, backed up against the wall outside his bedroom, with his father’s finger in her face and his voice caught somewhere between a sob and a shout – “you think you’re better than me? You think I can’t raise my boy? You think—you think I would be like this if he hadn’t killed her? I was gonna paint the nursery!” He remembers her tight lips and the way her eyes had looked – hunted, frightened, cornered. He thinks his eyes must look like that, sometimes, too. She’d slipped out the door into the crickets and the night and hadn’t come back the next day.

“Sensitive bitch,” his father had mumbled, and downed the rest of his beer.

The second one had woken him up with her cries. He’d slunk out to the living room and found her trapped against the counter like a little flightless bird, his father’s lips wet on her neck and his fingers clawing for a grip under her skirt. She’d pushed, and he’d stumbled, and she’d fled to the front door with her knuckles white around her purse and her cheeks wet with mascara-black tears. His father had stayed slumped against the stove for a long moment, drunk and dazed and slack-jawed, and he’d found himself hoping, in a quiet, terrible little part of his mind, that he’d never get back up. But he’d nudged a painting on the wall with his shoulder, and his father had jerked his head up, and sneered, and dragged himself to his feet.

“What’re you lookin’ at?” he’d grumbled, and staggered past him to the couch. His father had slumped down, and groaned, and flung his arm over his eyes, and he’d been left watching him with cold hands and heavy eyes. He’d started crying, then, and he hadn’t known why. “You sound like a goddamn girl,” his father had growled against his skin, and he’d wiped his nose and crept back to his room and spent the next hour sobbing silently in the strips of moonlight and the shadows cast by his windowpanes.

Sooner or later, the nannies stop coming. 

And that’s when it gets worse, really.

“I don’t know how to raise a kid, ma,” he hears his father say on the telephone one day, slumped in the kitchen with his back to the living room and his face flecked by the shadows of the raindrops slipping down the window in front of him. The house is grey and cold that day, all low thunder and diffuse light. He sounds desperate, tired, scared. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was gonna work, and Emily was gonna look after him – y’know, how it should be. I don’t know anything about schools or homework or—or _food_. What does a kid eat? How am I supposed to—to do _any_ of this? Can’t you take him? Please, ma. This ain’t—that’s got nothin’ to do with it. It don’t matter whether I want him or not – I just can’t _do this_. Do—? Do I—alright, you wanna know the truth? No! _No_ , I don’t want him. Am I s’posed to want the damn kid that killed my wife? No, ma, I’m not drunk! No—”

He stops listening after that. 

A little while later, he starts school, and it’s better. He doesn’t make any friends, and sometimes he’s a little lonely, but he learns about numbers and planets and far-away lands, and it’s better. It gets worse when the bell rings and he has to go home, but he learns to walk the long way back from school, past the warehouses and the railway tracks and the cars with smashed windows, past all the bricks and concrete and old streetlights with moths flittering against them, and by the time he gets home, there’s a frozen dinner in the refrigerator and static on the television and his father snoring on the couch, and it’s alright. He eats his dinner on the counter, and washes the cutlery, and puts away the bowls and the plates, and then he sits by his open window and listens to the crickets and makes up names for the stars in the dark sky. He spends a lot of time in his room. It’s the only place he knows his father won’t be. He wishes they had a garden.

“How was your day?” his father drawls one day, when he gets home a little early and finds him still awake on the couch. He freezes by the front door, and stares at his father with wide rabbit eyes, and doesn’t feel the misty rain dampening the back of his shirt, or the way his too-big backpack pulls at his shoulders and makes his back ache. His father grunts and curls his lip and tears open a can of beer, and “fine, don’t talk to me, then” is the last thing he says to him for the rest of the night.

He’s glad for that, really. He knows the only reason they ever had nannies, the only reason they ever forked out money they didn’t have, is because his father wants nothing to do with him. They could never afford them, but his father shelled out the coins from between the couch cushions just so he didn’t have to spend time with his son. They could never afford them, but he gave up meals and electricity bills and hot water just so he didn’t have to be there for him. 

He knows his father can’t look him in the eye, knows he doesn’t like to be in the same room as him, knows he blames him.

He’s known that for a long time.

He doesn’t tell his father when he starts to lose his baby teeth. He wobbles them with his tongue and swallows down the blood, and when they fall out, he tucks them under his pillow and falls asleep dreaming of gaping smiles and empty gums. The tooth fairy never comes. He feels silly for ever expecting her to. He buries the teeth in the pot of dead anthuriums on the front porch and imagines millipedes curling up inside them. 

One Saturday, his father finds him prodding at a loose tooth in the bathroom mirror, propped up with his bare feet on a little plastic stool.

“What’re you doin’?” his father asks, blinking sleep out of his eyes and looking as harmless as he’s ever seen him. The stench of old, stale beer makes his stomach ache.

“Nothing,” he says quietly, and clambers off the stool with blood on his fingers.

“No, hey, don’t walk away from me, kid.” His father catches his shoulder as he tries to brush past through the doorway. He stares down at the brown tiles on the floor, old, prickly anxiety fluttering in his chest like a wasp with paper wings. His veins feel threadbare and cold. “Look at me when I speak to you.” Nothing. His father cuffs him over the back of the head, just a little too hard to be playful; he freezes, doesn’t let himself flinch, just stares down, down, down. “Kid. Hey. Don’t be a brat.”

 _(Kid_. He doesn’t like to call him by his name, the name his mother gave him before he killed her. Sometimes he calls him Benny, in a sour, mocking sort of way. The teachers at school call him Benjamin. The other children call him Ben, when they call him anything at all. He doesn’t know what he calls himself. _What does my name mean?_ He’d asked his father once, for a school project. _How should I know?_ His father had growled from the shadows of the couch, face lit by the television screen and voice slurred by beer. _Woman-killer? Murderer? Bloodsucker?_ _Go look it up in one of those clever books of yours; you ain’t gonna learn much from your deadbeat dad. So much better than me, aren’t you? Think you’re so much better than your old man._

He’d locked himself in his room and listened to his father pound against the door, cradling himself on the floor beneath his open window, till he’d fallen quiet at three in the morning, slumped in the corridor and snoring into his chest. He’d slipped a cushion from the living room under his father’s head and stared down at him as he slept, thinking all the sad, hollow, hateful things a child ought not to think.

The next morning, he’d gone to the library, and asked the woman with the stern face for a book full of old names and big words, and he’d flicked through the pages until he’d found the names starting with “B”, and then he’d read. _Son of Jacob. Son of my sorrow. The runt of a litter._ _Killed his mother in childbirth._ He’d put the book back on the shelf and cried on the concrete steps behind the library, and the next day he’d turned up to school with his project incomplete and come home with welts on his knuckles from the teacher’s cane.)

He raises his eyes. His father looks back, and it’s only a moment or two before the regret leeches into his gaze like threads of sticky ink and he glances away uneasily, just as unaccustomed to looking his son in the eye as his son is to looking at his father. And then he smiles, crooked and hopeful. “What, you—you got a loose tooth or somethin’?”

He doesn’t answer, just stares up at his father with his head silent and the heartbeat in his chest slow and dull.

“C’mon,” his father says, jerking his head towards the corridor and offering him a sharp, toothy smile. “We’ll get it out together. It’ll be fun.” When he doesn’t respond, his father curls his lip and shoves him ahead, growling, “why d’you always have to make everything so damn difficult?”

He doesn’t say anything, simply follows his father with pins and needles in his toes and fear tickling behind his eyes like pinpricks of hot white. He doesn’t say anything as his father reappears with a bundle of knotted white string from the kitchen drawer, or as he ties it around the bathroom door handle in an ugly bow and whistles as he works. “Open up,” he says, looming over him with the string stretched out between his fingers. When he shakes his head, his father sighs irritably and slaps his hands down against his thighs. He falls silent for a moment, calming himself with a shake of his head and a roll of his eyes and a deep breath, before holding the string back up and forcing a smile. “C’mon – it don’t hurt. My old man did it for me when I was your age and it was fine.” He ruffles his hair, and ignores the way he freezes. “Look, kid, I promise, okay? Nothing to it. Now, open your mouth.”

He doesn’t. His father gets angry. He throws his arms around, and raises his voice, and calls him ugly names, and throws the string at his face, and shoves past him down the corridor. He gets drunk, and he hears his father mumbling on the couch from his room well past midnight, just loud enough to be heard – _I’m tryna be a good father, I’m tryna have some father-son bonding…_

He goes to sleep feeling sick with guilt, and the next morning there’s a bruise on his arm where his father gripped him. It’s not the first time he thinks it’s his fault. That he deserves it. That he did something wrong to make his father angry. _He was just trying to be a good dad._ _I was ungrateful. He loves me._

He wonders what it’s like for other children when they lose their baby teeth. He wonders if they wake up with bruises, too. He thinks they might get presents. He’d like that.

He’s six when he learns to lie.

He lies when he drops the bottle of milk on the way home from the shops and watches it drain out into the gutter, because he doesn’t want his father to shout at him and call him words like “stupid” and “idiot”. He tells his father they were out of milk, and forces himself to look him in the eye as he says it. His father believes it, and he locks himself in his room and thinks up all kinds of terrible, impossible ways that the truth could come out and what’ll happen when it does. He falls asleep feeling sick and anxious and guilty.

He lies when he rips the sleeve of his shirt on a thorn bush and watches the fabric soak with blood, because he doesn’t want his father to shout at him for wasting what little money they have. He tells his father a boy beat him up at school, and watches the next day as the boy who did nothing wrong has his knuckles caned by the headmaster. He thinks he ought to feel worse than he does. A part of him is happy that his father cared enough to complain to the school at all.

He lies when he hauls a stack of frozen dinners to the dumpster behind the gas station a few blocks down the street and throws them in, because he’s tired of eating the same thing every day, and the dissatisfaction makes him angry, and the anger makes him brave, and the bravery makes him defiant and reckless and rash. He tells his father they had gone rotten, and they eat butter on bread for dinner. He doesn’t think anything has ever tasted better. 

He gets good at it.

A man with blond hair comes to visit him, catches up to him on the street when he’s walking home from school and offers him a chocolate bar with a small smile and sad eyes. “It’s your birthday today, isn’t it?” he asks, and there’s something about him that makes him want to cry, makes him want to trust. The man smiles again, rests his hand so gently on his shoulder; it feels warm, safe, _important_. It feels like something _more_. “Don’t tell your dad.”

He slips the chocolate bar into his pocket and nods. The man kneels down and leans his forearms on his knees, wrists overlapping. Their eyes are level now. “I’m sorry for everything that’s going to happen, Benjamin,” the man tells him quietly. “You really did deserve better.”

A smile, and then he’s gone.

He’s alone again.

“Do you wanna know a secret, Ben?” his father asks that Christmas, when he’s drunk on cheap eggnog and the radio is blaring crackly carols that hurt his ears and the living room walls are dark with shadows and pale with the light from the blank television screen. He sips at his hot cocoa and turns his head from where he’s sitting on the floor to look at his father with a small smile. He almost feels happy.

“If I could choose – if I had a say in anything that happened – I’d’ve let you die in a heartbeat. She was so good. You don’t know how good she was – you have no idea.” His father sniffs and drags the back of his hand across his nose. “I’d let you bleed out on the forest floor like a damn dog,” he mumbles into his glass, hot breath fogging the sides.

He’s seven when he gets his first pair of glasses. He should have gotten them sooner, but his father didn’t want to pay. He wouldn’t have gotten them at all, really, if his teacher hadn’t sent a letter home saying his inability to read the blackboard was interfering with his learning.

His father is the first one to make fun of him for them, snatching them off his face and keeping them out of reach and laughing that terrible sort of laugh that makes him feel guilty and weak. He gets annoyed when he doesn’t see the humour in it, muttering _“fine, be a serious little prick”_ and trudging off to the kitchen.

The kids at school start soon after.

He stops wearing them outside his bedroom, folding them into his pocket with fumbling hands and aching eyes whenever his father knocks on his door. In class, he sneaks them onto his face for a split second, just long enough to squint at the blackboard and scribble down some notes, before tucking them back into his pocket.

“Where are those glasses I got you?” his father drawls from the couch one evening, glancing over at where he’s quietly eating his dinner on the kitchen counter, ankles hooked around the metal legs of the stool. “They cost a damn fortune. Did you lose ‘em?”

He shakes his head.

“Well, then, where are they?”

“I don’t need them,” he says softly, not looking up from his mashed potatoes. “I can see fine.”

“Don’t need ‘em,” his father grunts disbelievingly, swallowing another mouthful of beer and tossing the can onto the coffee table. It lands with a clatter than makes him flinch and stiffen.

He learns to cope with the headaches.

He’s eight when the hitting starts.

It’s not often, but it’s enough, and the unpredictability only makes it worse.

He learns to lower his eyes, to stay quiet and still, to keep his head bowed; he learns not to make noise, to slink around the house, to clean up after his father, and stay out of his way when he’s drunk, and speak when spoken to.

He keeps his thoughts quiet, too. A part of him is afraid his father will hear them.

He hates the way he freezes whenever his father looks at him.

He hates the way he never fights back.

He hates the way he feels like a coward.

He hates the way he feels dirty, and wrong, and tainted.

 _I hate you,_ he whispers to himself one night, when the house is creaking in the quiet and the breeze seeping through the window is cold and damp.

It feels like rebellion.

And it doesn’t feel true.

He goes to sleep feeling guilty and sick, and with a bruise blooming across his cheek. It aches in the night, and he dreams of a warm, quiet jungle that feels like peace and safety and being cared for, being loved, being _known_. It feels like home, and as long as he stays asleep, he feels special.

 _One day_ , the jungle whispers, _you will be free of him._

_You need to be patient, Benjamin._

The dream isn’t warm and quiet anymore.

Now, it feels dark, like it’s reaching for him, like—

He wakes up and scrambles to the bathroom to throw up.

He drags himself up to look at himself in the mirror, panting around the nausea and the exhaustion. A purple-black bruise on his cheekbone stares back at him. 

The feeling of the dream stays with him well past dawn, when grey, watery light washes over his cracked walls and brings with it the far-off sounds of sirens and car horns and shouting, and the smell of grime and exhaust fumes and dust from construction sites floats in on the breeze – the warbles of foreign birds he’s never heard before; the feeling of sweat sticking his shirt to his back, and the still, humid air filling his lungs to bursting. The smell of earth and sweet fruit and green.

It’s all so _wild_ , and he thinks that must be what it feels like to be free.

Sometimes his father is kind, or funny, and that makes it worse.

Sometimes he sits with him on the couch, and they watch late-night movies with dumb stories and bad acting, and they laugh and make fun of the people on the screen, and even when he starts to feel uncomfortable, even when his father goes a little too far and makes comments that verge just too close to cruel, he keeps laughing, because it’s the closest he ever sees his father to being happy, and he doesn’t want to ruin it.

Sometimes his father is up early enough to wish him a good day at school, and sometimes he gives him a hug before he leaves.

Sometimes his father makes a joke – some dumb, ridiculous joke that isn’t really that funny at all – and he can’t stop himself from smiling, and then his father smiles, and he smiles some more, and for a moment, everything’s alright.

Sometimes his father kisses the top of his head and says he doesn’t really blame him – it’s not his fault – she would have died anyway – and he doesn’t mock him when he cries.

And every time, he thinks _maybe now everything will be okay._

And every time, it isn’t.

He never stops hoping that one day, things will be different; never stops thinking that _maybe he’ll change, maybe I’ve over-reacting, maybe he really is trying to be a good dad for me_ ; never stops hoping that one day – maybe one day – he’ll wake up and his father will smile when he sees him, and he won’t be afraid or angry or hurt anymore, and everything will be alright.

What, after all, wouldn’t a father do for his son?

He supposes he’s always been too forgiving for his own good.

Too eager to believe, starving for the faintest trace of affection, so willing to give himself up to devotion and lost causes – so desperate to be special, important, wanted, _needed_.

 _Pathetic_ , is what his father would call it. He doesn’t have any other name for it, so he calls it that, too.

He doesn’t think it’s fair that he hears all about the forests of Oregon, about the sea and the cliffs and the trees that go on for miles and miles, and that he’s never seen them.

Not a lot is fair in his life, he supposes.

He’s nine when he learns to cook.

He borrows books from the library and follows along to the recipes in the kitchen. He finds that he likes creating things from nothing and hums as he bakes, forgetting where he is for as long as there’s flour on his arms and the smell of sugar baking in the oven.

His father says he must’ve inherited that gift from his mother, and it’s the closest thing to a compliment he thinks his father has ever given him. He smiles for the rest of the evening and goes to sleep with his chest warm and light as air.

The next night, his father calls him a nasty word that he’s heard once or twice before, one that men like his father call boys who like boys. He says it in a joking sort of way, with a big grin and slap on his back, but it makes him feel ill and self-conscious, and he doesn’t laugh along. He washes the dishes in silence and doesn’t cook the next night.

The next week, the oven breaks.

It’s spring when he breaks his arm.

Well, when he has it broken.

He makes a mistake, some silly, small mistake that he doesn’t really understand, and his father catches him in the hallway when he tries to brush past, and he shouts at him for not looking him in the eye, and the air smells like hot beer and unbrushed teeth, and then he’s against the wall, and his bones splinter, and he thinks that scream must be the loudest sound he’s made in his life.

“Stop bein’ such a damn baby,” his father sneers, but there’s no heat to it, and he catches the flicker of fear, of _uncertainty_ , in his eyes before he turns away and staggers back to the living room, leaving him crumpled on the floor.

His father doesn’t take him to the hospital. He catches the bus.

It isn’t until he’s on the night-time service on the way home that he reaches into his pocket for his glasses and finds them shattered. The glass sprinkles down on the metal floor like powdered sugar – _tap, tap, tap_. And it’s such a stupid, meaningless thing, that powder on the dirty bus floor, but it’s the feather, the breaking point, the insignificant finale that bubbles up inside him and overflows. He hides his face in his hands, and he cries.

He gets very good at sorting his emotions into neat little boxes and tucking them away into the far-off corners of his mind.

He gets very good at making himself believe he doesn’t feel a thing.

It’s the only way he’s going to make it out of this house alive.

He’s ten when his father tells him to pack his bags.

“A job’s come up,” he says, and it’s as excited as he’s ever heard his father sound. He flits around from room to room, babbling as he goes with the edge of a laugh catching in his voice – “now, it’s far away – some damn island in the middle of nowhere no one’s ever heard of – but there’s a—there’s a good school, and you’ll be able to look at all the dumb trees you want, and I’ll be able to help change the goddamn world – their words, not mine. Everyone’s friendly, too, accordin’ to Horace. It’ll be good. You’ll see, Ben. It’ll be good.”

He doesn’t have much to pack, because he doesn’t really have much at all, but he takes the framed picture of his parents (which he only really keeps because his mother is in it, and he doesn’t want to make his father angry by cutting him out of it), and a few books, and then he’s looking around at his house for the last time, and the bus pulls up at the bus stop down the street, and they’re gone.

He’s already broken by then.

He doesn’t realise he’s so horribly, utterly touch-starved until Annie hugs him. He doesn’t realise he’s been so irreversibly ruined by his father’s cruelty until he freezes at the contact, unable to equate physical touch with anything but bruises and split lips.

He doesn’t hug her back.

He doesn’t know how to.

_One day, Ben,_ Richard tells him, _you’re going to be very important._

 _What about now?_ he asks, and he almost winces at how fragile he sounds, how _delicate_ , like glass one storm away from shattering. All broken things, after all, were once hopeful things, and the two can sometimes sound very much the same.

_For now, all any of us can do is wait._

The Island whispers to him, calls him words like _important_ , and _special_ , and _king_.

It cradles him in his dreams, heals all his bruises him with gentle water and warm earth and birdsong, and he thinks, _this must be what it’s like to have a mother._

He’s never loved anything the way he loves it.

He makes sandwiches for one of the Hostiles.

He doesn’t appreciate it very much.

He wakes up in a canvas tent in the jungle with a bullet hole in his gut, and they tell him, _it’s time._

“Our training of future leaders begins at a very young age, Ben,” Richard tells him one evening, when he’s hunched over a log by the fire, nibbling meekly at roots and seeds with an ache in his stomach. The fire is bright and hot amidst a jungle of shadows. He can feel the flames on his cheeks. “With your permission, I’d like to place you under Eloise’s guidance. She will share with you everything she knows of the Island, and—”

“You—you want me to…”

“To be our leader, Ben, yes. Not now, obviously. In fact, it won’t be for many, many years. But I know you can be patient, can’t you?”

Whenever he can sneak away from his father, Eloise teaches him their history, all the faith, hope, and bloodshed, and how his own people came to play their role in that story. She teaches him the mythology, though she calls it truth; she tells him of the man named Jacob, of his kindness and mercy and his gifts, of the bond the leader shares with him, a bond that can never be broken. She tells him of the whispers, and the magic, and the monsters. She tells him of religion, and belief, and devotion. She tells him the Island is a living thing, and he believes her.

She teaches him how to track, and how to navigate, and how to forage. She shows him every inch of the Island – well, the parts she can reach. The other parts he knows well enough. For the parts kept beyond her reach, the tamed parts of the untameable Island wailing for freedom from behind sonic fences and armed guards, she tells him of them with hand-drawn figures and maps – she tells him of the frozen wheel beneath their unnatural structure of steel and concrete, and of the ancient tomb beneath their houses, and of the water that can summon the black smoke; tells him off the carved stone that leads the way from the Temple, and of the unimportance of time, and of such impossible things that don’t seem quite so impossible when they’re in the jungle beneath the brilliant blue sky.

She shows him how to fight, and this time he doesn’t mind the bruises and the split lips and the aching bones whenever she gets the best of him, which is most of the time. She shows him how to use a gun, and how to use a knife, and how to row an outrigger.

He picks up her snide, dry humour, her cool, blank eyes and her imperious coldness and her necessary cruelty; she is aloof, and grand, and gentle, and witty, and he loves her. 

She pieces him back together, and for the first time in his life, he thinks he understands what it is to have a mother. For a little while, he’s almost happy.

And then she leaves.

Widmore is not the leader she was. He calls him _boy_ , and tells him he has no place being here, and that he will never be the leader this Island needs. A part of him believes him. The other part wants to snarl back, _you’re wrong._

The softness that Eloise had lined his chest with like cotton wool freezes and cracks, and he feels it drift away on the breeze, far beyond his reach.

The looks Richard gives him are frightening, sometimes. They look like disgust, fear, uncertainty.

He doesn’t understand them. Everything he is now is because Richard made him this way. Because he _saved_ him.

And it’s all for a reason, isn’t it?

He’s _special_.

For a little while, he thinks Richard can be the sort of father he’s never had the chance to have.

For a little while, he clings to him, trails after him through valleys and jungles, laps up his every word like they’re holy, looks up at him like there’s magic in his bloodstream. He tells him stories of shipwrecks and gifts and miracles, of sacrifice and devotion and Jacob.

Eventually, Richard proves disappointing, and he outgrows him.

Things on pedestals can never live up to the stories he crafts for them in his head.

He doesn’t know why he takes her back with him. All he knows is that he can’t leave an infant with a deranged girl in the jungle, a _girl_ scarcely more than a child herself – and then she’s staring up at him with those big, wet eyes, and grabbing at his shirt with her tiny hands, and he feels something unfurl in his chest, something that feels like a burst of warmth and hope and liquid sunshine, and he can’t leave her. Amidst all the fear and panic and adrenaline, with his throat closed up and the mother screaming herself hoarse and his hands shaking around the pistol, he can’t stop thinking one mad, senseless thought: _I can’t leave her._

He stumbles with her back through the black trees, with her mother screaming for her from the darkness, and somewhere along the way, she stops squirming, and stops wailing, and she falls silent, curling up against his heart and letting him cradle her like he’s always been there, and she’s always been his, and nothing else has ever mattered very much at all.

When he reaches the edge of the camp, with Ethan prattling anxiously at his elbow and the nearby fire throwing sparks of warm orange light and long, black shadows through the jungle, he stops. The sky is dark that night, the moon hidden behind pale, wispy clouds. He looks down at her, and feels her thin, frail chest rising and falling against his own like a little bird’s, and he drowns in more love than he knows what to do with – soft, and warm, and gentle, and endless. He holds her in his arms, and he feels all the things his father has never felt for him, and he wonders if this is what his mother felt in the moments before he killed her. 

A new brand of contempt trickles into his bloodstream at the thought, one laced with acid and disgust and hate. _How could he not have loved me if this is what it’s like?_

He looks down at her, and he thinks, _I am not my father_.

And, for the first time in so long, he has a little more to live for than the whispered promise of _greatness_ and the warning of _patience_. Alex. In the end, it’s always going to be Alex.

It’s the most difficult thing he’s ever had to do, splitting his time between this false life of Work Man and neglect and cereal in black and white boxes, and _Alex_. He sneaks out when he can, out into the jungle and the still, damp air, but there are times when he goes weeks without seeing her. She says her first words without him, takes her first steps, learns to tread water in the stream by the camp. By the time he sees her next, she has a favourite song, and a favourite bird, and she doesn’t pay him much attention at all. They don’t apologise for the behaviour of the youngest wildling, and he doesn’t expect them to. She is one of them, and he is not.

But she knows he is her father, and even when she punishes him for leaving her alone for so long with childish glares and sullen silences, it’s still him she comes to when she cuts herself on a thorn, or burns herself on a stick in the fire, or falls from a low-hanging branch. _You spoil her,_ they tell him. _She ought to learn to cope with pain._

 _No child should have to cope with their pain alone,_ is what he doesn’t say.

He brings books to read to her, even when the others watch him with narrowed eyes and call him _one of them_. He sits with her until she falls asleep, and learns to braid her hair, and lets her teach him games in the jungle until they shout for her to come home for supper; he listens to her lisping, halting stories, and plays the monsters in her games so she can be the heroine, and the first time he sees her cry, it’s when she’s racing after him through the jungle because she forgot to say _I love you_ before he left.

“Why do you spend so much time away?” she mumbles one evening, when the sun is setting beyond the peach-washed trees and she knows he’ll have to leave soon. She’s sitting on his lap, twisting leaves and ribbons into her knotted hair.

“Because that is the will of Jacob,” he says bleakly, forgetting for a moment that he’s talking to a child. He looks down at her and smiles. She raises her eyes and doesn’t smile back.

“Why don’t I have a mommy?” she breathes out, after a long moment of silence.

He forces a jittery smile, and runs his palm over the top of her head, and wonders if he ever asked the same question, and wonders how his father could have looked into the face of such innocence and spit back at it. He tells Alex that she died, that she was sick, that she loved her just as much as he loves her now, and that she would have chosen to be with her if she had been given the choice. He tells her it was never her fault. He doesn’t want her to blame herself the same way he does.

“Oh,” Alex mumbles, with all that childish acceptance that would be called cruel if she were any older, and that’s all she says. She buries herself into his chest, small and warm and fragile, and is silent for the rest of the night. The cicadas start to chirp, and the warm, humid breeze carries the smell of damp earth and rot, and the fire sends orange embers sparking into the dark sky, and he holds her and hums a song he can’t remember the words to anymore. Some song from that other world.

It gets harder and harder to leave, until eventually it feels like his ribs are being pried open from the inside out.

“What, you too good to talk to me now?” his father sneers, when he stops rising to his bait. He hears the metallic crunch of a beer can being crushed from the couch behind him.

He continues slicing the carrots into little medallions, and looks out the window at the buttery light washing over the grass from all the windows beyond his house, and thinks of Alex sleeping out there in the dark, quiet jungle, and he doesn’t reply.

There's Ethan, at least. He's a child, but it's something to be able to pass him on the mown grass and share a glance and know - that he's like him, that he's living the same double life as he is. That he's lying, too.

The coldness that boy eyes his parents with sometimes chills even him. Ethan made his choice far more firmly than he ever did. If it weren't for Alex, he wouldn't be half so devoted.

But when Ethan puts his parents to death, when he slips on his gas mask, when he finds him standing over his mother's body and watching what he himself could not, he's still a child. And he still needs a parent.

And so that's what he becomes. 

The time comes.

 _(They need to go,_ Richard had said, fiery-eyed in the night-time jungle camp after the latest death of one of their own, after the latest fury.

They argue around him, around the fire burning between the canvas tents and the trees. He stands, wide-eyed and silent and staring, lost to the shadows, forgotten, gaze flicking wildly between them.  
  
 _I might know a way,_ he blurts out, and the suddenness of it, the sound of the half-formed, horrible idea spoken aloud, makes him tense.   
  
A dozen eyes turn toward him.)

“Keep her far away,” he tells them, watching Alex perched on the branch of a ficus, weaving a basket with her legs dangling in thin air and a soft, smiling song lisping from between her teeth. “A war is no place for a child.”

“We’ve been playing at war for far longer than you’ve been alive, boy.”

He raises his eyes to Charles. To the _leader_. “Of course. But you’ll keep her away?”

“We’ll keep her away.”

“And she won’t know a thing?”

“She won’t know a thing.”

He looks back at his daughter.

His father dies.

He can’t watch.

He’s always thought he would watch the whole thing, drink it in like sugar-water, etch it into his skull so he could remember it over and over when he’s lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.

He tries to – tries to turn his head as his father clutches at his arm and chokes out his name, tries to look him in the eye and watch the life drain out of them. But he doesn’t. He calls himself words like _coward_ and _weak_ , but he can’t. He can’t look.

Everyone dies, everyone who raised him, everyone who was kind and everyone who was cruel, and then he’s alone.

He supposes he always has been, really.

He expects to feel free.

He doesn’t.

The Island doesn’t speak to him that night.

He thinks it’s angry with him.

 _I did what I had to do,_ he says, to no one in particular.

_I did what I thought you wanted me to do._

He watches as everyone he’s ever known is kicked into a mass grave. No burial rites. No prayer. No mercy. He supposes these people don’t know of such things.

He melts into the dark, silent jungle alongside his new people, and he doesn’t let himself look back at the swing sets and the yellow flowers and the dark windows. There’s nothing left for him there anymore. It’s all just lifeless and empty.

Trauma, he learns, has never been sensible, and feelings are never rational, and all he feels as he trudges after his people through the still, humid trees is the guilt twisting in his gut like black smoke. _I forgive you,_ is all he can think, over and over and over, till the words lose all meaning and all that’s left is empty, hateful grief.

He feels like vomiting.

The ones they left behind rise to meet them when they emerge from the jungle into the fire-lit camp; they bustle around them, touch their hair, murmur words of comfort and praise. No one speaks to him. _He walks among us,_ a voice whispered in the jungle one night, long ago. _But he is not one of us._

No one greets Richard, either, and that’s a small comfort. He watches him disappear into his tent, and thinks that at least he understands what it is to be alone.

And then he sees her.

Alex scuttles out of the gloom and throws herself at him with all the squealing, frenzied force a four-year-old can muster. He smiles, and holds her to his waist, and listens to her babble excitedly about all the things wild children learn of when their tutors are streams and trees and women with knives and unwashed hair. He wonders if he’s ever going to understand this island as well as this little girl who was born in the sand and raised in the jungle. She musses his hair, and hooks an arm around his neck, and grins at him with a mouth full of milk teeth.

“Do you get to stay with us for good now, daddy?” she asks, with wide, hopeful eyes and a little lisp. The crackling firelight turns her face to shadow and her hair to copper.

“Yes, Alex,” he says softly, bouncing her once on his hip and smiling when she laughs. It’s an adjustment, living with a child far more tactile than he has ever allowed himself to be, or been allowed to be – always touching, hugging, kissing, cuddling. He learns not to tense up each time she takes his hands. He learns that not all forms of physical contact are painful. “I’m not going anywhere anymore.”

“And all the bad people are gone?”

“All the bad people are gone.”

“Good. I didn’t like sharing you with them.” He smiles. She smiles back, and taps the tip of his nose with her finger like she’s telling off an errant child.

“I missed you,” he murmurs.

But she’s not paying attention anymore. She wriggles to be put down, and he lowers her gently back onto the earth. “C’mon,” she says, taking his hand without looking and tugging on it. “I wanna show you somethin’ – I learned how to hide so good today and I bet you can’t find me in a _hundred_ years.”

For a moment, he forgets he’s grieving.

It’s difficult, living with them permanently. Monsoon season is the worst – if it were up to him, if he were back in the Barracks, he wouldn’t leave the warmth of his house; but these people are made of stronger stuff than this DHARMA boy from the mainland. They don’t mind the rain and the mud and the cold – _thrive_ in it, with grim-set faces and knives and stubbornness – and so he learns to cope.

Alex loves it – the endless rain, the thunder, the gloom. This is her world. When he’s with her, it’s not so bad.

The impatience gets the better of him.

“It’s time,” Richard tells him.

He sends Widmore off into exile, and he doesn’t know how it’s possible to feel so much cold, ugly fear and so much wild, messy delight at once. Charles’ reign of fear and bloodshed and tyranny is over. A new era has begun. He’s going to do things differently. He’s going to lead them into a brighter age. _I’m ready,_ he tells himself. _It’s time._

Why, then, does he feel like he’s forcing ajar a door that was never meant to be opened?

Why, then, does he feel like he’s treading down a path that was never supposed to see the light of day?

Why, then, does the Island fall silent?

The Barracks is silent. Returning there is more difficult than he thought it would be. He knows he shouldn’t grieve for the ghosts, that he shouldn’t care, that he shouldn’t be so shaken by the familiar sound of the roof settling, and the untouched cutlery in the kitchen drawer, and the old smell of _home_. But no one else knew their names. No one else knew their birthdays, and their favourite songs, and whose house was whose. No one else will mourn for them, and so he does.

It’s a lonely thing.

Richard’s people aren’t meant for pretty little houses with walls and ceilings and doors with locks, and so they sleep out on the grass that first night. He draws back the curtain and watches them – the blanket of clouds covering the stars, the fire crackling in the quiet, the smoke licking at the stars, the soft orange glow casting shadows across their faces. A breeze carries the smell of sweet smoke through the open window. Alex is out there, sitting by the fire and eating meat off the bone. He would have liked her to come with him into his home, would have liked to imagine she felt some special connection to this world just through association with him, but she strains and tugs at his grip like a wild horse when he tried to guide her to the porch, and so he let her go. He’ll never force her, but that doesn’t change the dull ache in his heart as he watches her now.

Richard catches him watching and turns his head to look at him.

He draws the curtains shut and stands there for a long moment, heart pounding. He ought to go out there and join them. He doesn’t know why the thought makes him feel sick.

He slips an album from its cover – doesn’t matter which – and presses down the stylus. The music almost drowns out the silence of the house. For the first time in his life, there’s no sound of his father in the other room. For the first time in his life, he can walk through all the rooms without ducking his head and dropping his gaze and feeling tension clicking in his muscles. For the first time, he can feel like more than an unwanted guest in his own home. For the first time, he doesn’t have to feel afraid, and rigid, and anxious, and unwelcome.

He lies down on the couch and stares numbly at the opposite wall until he falls asleep.

He tries to do the right thing. He tries to usher his people into a bright new era, tries to give them a better life – an _easier_ one. He tames them. He domesticates them. He teaches them the history of the DHARMA Initiative, introduces them to their technology and to their stations. He moves them into the little yellow houses, teaches them how to use washing machines and stoves and record players, dresses them in the clothes the workers left behind and teaches them how to iron them. He organises book clubs, and keeps them within the confines of the pylons, and tells them to wash their hands before eating.

“Their place is in the jungle,” Richard hisses one morning, when the light is soft and buttery and he is spitting with rage and disbelief. He’s still dressed like the old days, dirty and unsophisticated, and he wants to tell him not to lean on his kitchen counter. “Their purpose is to protect and serve the Island – how are they supposed to do that _here?_ They are supposed to be wild, Ben, to be free – they are not your toys to coop up and confine in your doll’s house and—and modernise because you _feel_ like it. You are interfering with their connection to this Island, a connection far more ancient and important and _sacred_ than you could ever hope to understand. That jungle is their spiritual home, Ben, the one Jacob chose for them. They are supposed to be _there_. You can’t undo centuries of instinct and purpose because you don’t approve of their way of life. This is not what the Island wants. This is not what _Jacob—_ ”

“Forgive me if I’m not understanding this correctly, Richard,” he replies, prim and sour and looking up from the dishes he’s washing in the sink for the first time since Richard started talking, “but I thought that, as leader, whatever I want is what the Island wants.”

Richard stares at him like he’s looking at a monster.

Like he’s looking at a mistake. 

He hates him for it.

“Not like this,” Richard whispers.

He breaks the eye contact with a little shake of his head and dries his hands on a polka-dotted tea-towel. “Clean yourself up,” he says coldly, handing it to Richard and brushing past him without looking up.

“Ben, I don’t—”

He snaps his head up and meets Richard’s eyes. He looks so tired, so miserable. It makes something nasty and cruel inside him quiver with satisfaction. “Alex wants you to stay for dinner, Richard,” he replies, all stiff and prissy. “We’re eating at six. Perhaps you might be able to go one meal without undermining me.”

And, oh, he hates him – because he was meant to be his father, he was supposed to _love_ him. Richard made him into what he is, raised him on stories and myths and words like “sacrifice” and “important” and “death”. He stole his innocence, turned him into a killer – _you have to take care of your father,_ he’d whispered, so soft and sweet and empty, gently slipping a gasmask into his hands; _it’s the only way you can become what Jacob needs you to be_ – and now he looks at him like he’s something corrupt, something soiled, because he can’t live up to the crown he thrust onto his head when he was just a child. Now he can’t even look him in the face. _He hates what I’ve become._

He should hate himself the most, then.

His people split into factions – the ones who follow him, and the ones who move into the Temple. _We cannot live in the homes of our tormentors,_ they tell him. He would have thought it would be called conquering.

Two days into his leadership, and his people have already splintered in half. 

That old insecurity niggles at the edge of his skull.

The Island still doesn’t talk him.

The dreams don’t come.

The silence is overwhelming.

He assigns one of his people to a post in the Flame. He’s never been there before, and he doesn’t know precisely how to operate the equipment, but he bluffs his way through it, and she believes he knew all along.

“Find us someone who can pilot a submarine,” he says. “Someone broken and unhappy with their life out there. It’ll be easier to earn their loyalty.”

A few weeks later, she slips a file onto his desk. “He can’t pilot a submarine,” she says, when he looks up at her over the top of his glasses, “but he’s certainly unhappy.”

He opens the folder. “An eye-patch?”

“Lost it in Afghanistan.” It’s almost funny, the way she says that word; it means nothing to her, just a name on a map of a world she knows nothing of. He swallows back a laugh.

He’s silent for a long moment, and then he nods once and hands the folder back to her. “Alright.” Before the door clicks shut behind her, he snaps his head up and calls, “tell him Jacob wants him here.”

“Doesn’t he?”

He stares back at her, fingers frozen around his pen. “Of course,” he says simply, and looks back down at his journal. He hardly hears the door close.

He assigns two of his people to posts in the Looking Glass. He’s never been down there, and he doesn’t know precisely how to operate the equipment, but he bluffs his way through it, and they believe he knew all along.

He teaches his people how to leave the Island, and they come back with a Soviet veteran looking for something to fix him, and something to die for.

“It’s not your place to bring people to the Island,” Richard insists, out of breath as he hurries between the houses after the little boy who has become a king, “just as it isn’t your place to tell our people how to leave it. They have all been brought here for a reason – in fact, most of them were _born_ here. Jacob is the _only one_ —”

He stops and turns to face Richard, the sunlight momentarily blinding him. Richard is a blur of browns and greys without his glasses, but he doesn’t have to see to know there’s disgust etched into every line in his skin. “It’s my place to decide what my people need, Richard,” he says, voice quivering at the very edge of calm. “And I’ve decided.”

Richard vanishes into the jungle after that. He doesn’t see him for a week.

He wonders if he’s asking Jacob if he made the right choice in choosing that broken boy to lead them.

He shows Alex the Island – well, all the parts she doesn’t know already. All the places Eloise showed him all those years ago. He holds her hands, and lets go when she does, and lets her climb trees and chase after birds and search for pretty rocks in stream beds, even if it makes him nervous.

“Be careful,” he always says, voice tight and fragile.

“Stop _worrying!_ ” she always calls back, voice bubbly and self-assured and free – so free – and he’s as proud of it as he is terrified.

She’s witty, and defiant, and bold, and smart – so smart. She’s arrogant, and hot-headed, and loving, and kind. She’s good. So good. Gentler than he knew a living thing could be.

She likes dark things – ghost stories, scary old movies when at last he coaxes her in front of the television, tales of death and blood and mishaps in the night-time woods, much as he tries to tell her instead of golden wonderlands and rabbits with seagulls for friends and safe, happy things. Lion-hearted, is what she is. Soft as a doe and fierce as anything. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be worthy of her, and his heart aches as much as it glows each time she calls him _daddy_.

He would do anything to keep her like this – innocent, and unbroken, and his. In love with everything in all the world, and so much better than all of it.

He reads her bedtime stories, and makes hot cocoa for her and tea for himself when she has bad dreams, which is often, and sits with her to listen, or to be silent, or to simply hold her until she’s ready to go back to sleep. The nightmares are always the same – a woman screaming, death and fear and dread and knives, a shadow creeping in through her bedroom window and dragging her into the jungle, or out of the jungle and into a house. All the things a child her age should know nothing of.

He lives in terror of the night she dreams up his face in the shadow’s place.

He lets her stay up as late as she likes each birthday, and brings her back presents when he leaves the Island, and teaches her how to use cutlery and eat from a porcelain plate, and washes her hair for her in the bath till she’s old enough to do it by herself. He sits with her when she’s ill and can’t breathe through her nose, and cleans up her sick on the living room floor when she eats a bad mango from the jungle floor, and cooks with her perched on his hip, till she grows restless and demands to be put down and starts wanting to cut up the carrots herself.

He lets her doze with her head on his thigh when he reads late at night, and sits with her on the front porch till the birds start singing and the sky tinges pink when she tip-toes into his bedroom and says she can’t sleep. He sings for her whenever she tells him to _sing the song, daddy,_ and it’s always the same song, and she never lets him get away with simply humming it, and she always joins in near the end; he watches old black-and-white movies with her, because that’s all they have, and because she likes them. She likes The Wizard of Oz the most.

He teaches her how to read, and puts on funny voices for all the characters in her stories to make her laugh – voices too low or too high, voices with accents and voices with twangs. It’s just another form of lying, really. He’s good at being someone he isn’t.

He reads at his desk, and she lies sprawled out on the rug reading a book of her own with her ankles hooked together in the air, and sometimes she’ll wander up and sit on his lap and ask what a word means. She holds his glasses up to her face, and stumbles around the room, and laughs at how blind he is – and he laughs along, because she isn’t his father, and her teasing isn’t cruel.

He takes her trick-or-treating around the Barracks in June, because she heard it mentioned in a movie filled with pumpkins and candles and chimney smoke, and she says it doesn’t matter that she’s the only child; he sews her Dorothy’s dress, and tells them all to have a piece of candy ready at each house, and they all pretend not to know her, and compliment her on her costume. _Say thank you, Alex,_ he tells her each time, and doesn’t scold her when she forgets, and learns to apologise for her. _Don’t eat it all at once,_ he tells her when they get home, and holds her hair back when she doesn’t listen and spends the evening throwing up into the toilet bowl. Six months in captivity and she still can’t tolerate sugar.

He dotes on her, and doesn’t mind the wry little smiles all the others flash at each other behind his back – their great king, weak at the hands of his daughter.

“Doesn’t it bother you,” Richard asks one day, sitting beside him on the porch with a cup of tea cooling on the armrest and Alex playing by herself in the front yard, “that you aren’t really her father?”

“I am her father,” he snaps back, fear fluttering in his throat and making his voice quiver, and realises a little too late that Richard is trying to hurt him. A century of peacemaking has turned his amusements callous, and it doesn’t help that he’s started to hate the broken little boy that he put on the throne. _He never treated Eloise like this,_ he thinks bitterly, at the same time another little voice sneers, _because Eloise didn’t deserve it_. “I raised her.”

“She’s going to find out sooner or later,” he says, voice soft and idle and hollow enough to cut as he takes a sip of his tea. He can just hear Alex talking to herself. “And it isn’t going to be pretty.” He lets out a short, sharp breath, and it sounds like a laugh.

“Yes, well, at least I have something to lose. Remind me, Richard, what exactly do you have?”

Richard stares at him, wide-eyed and violent, but he doesn’t respond. Defying the leader you are sworn to serve, he supposes, is against one of Jacob’s many rules. He savours the small victory, as weak and ashy as it tastes in his mouth. He knows Richard is right. He knows the day will come, but he’ll keep trying to force it back and bury it alive and drown it out until it does. He turns away from him, and sits back in his seat, and tries to swallow down his tea around a mouthful of bile.

Every time she gets sick, he thinks _this is it_ – _this is how the Island takes her back. This is how it punishes me. This is how she dies._ Every time, she gets better. And every time, he feels like he’s been given his life back for just a few more days. The fear never goes away. It’s going to come for her eventually. He wonders, in a numb, terrified sort of way, if he’ll be so grateful it’s finally speaking to him that he’ll give it whatever it asks for.

He wakes up sometimes to find Alex curled up beside him in bed. More often, he is awoken by her crawling all over him, or jumping on his bed, or barrelling into him with a running start. It always ends the same, though – mock annoyance, and big smiles, and her dozing in the crook of his neck with her arm thrown over his chest and the dawn light turning her face to shadows. As fragile as a bird. As he drifts back into thin, shallow sleep, the thought is always the same, nonsensical and intangible and brushing around behind his eyes like delicate strands of thread: _nothing is ever going to happen to you._ He’s known it from the very start, really. He would kill to keep her safe.

She helps him cook, as well as a four-year-old can, and he doesn’t get mad when she gets underfoot and drops dishes – he doesn’t raise his voice, or blame her, or make her cry, because he’s not his father, and he never wants Alex to feel any of the ugly, guilty fear that he did. They eat their meals together in a happy bubble of chatter and just-washed hair and pyjamas that smell of soap and warmth, and Alex sits with a towel wrapped around her shoulders to keep her wet hair off her clothes, and the world outside the window is so dark beyond the soft yellow light overhead, and sometimes he lets her play a record in the background – and he falls in love with the small, simple moments of being wanted and needed and important. He falls in love with the gentle, meaningless things – with having someone who always remembers his birthday, and brings him clumsily-made breakfast with cold toast and spilled tea and a flower from the garden with the dirt still clinging to the roots; with the comforting sound of someone in the other room, singing and muttering and making up whole worlds inside her head; with the scribbled drawings she brings him, and her careless smiles, and the nights she pretends to fall asleep on the couch just so he’ll carry her to bed; with the shrieking giggles when he tickles her, and the silly notes she’ll leave around his desk and his bedroom – _I love you_ and _Alex loves Daddy_ in messy, scratchy handwriting – and the way she has everyone wrapped around her little finger.

He worries that she’s lonely sometimes, the only child on the Island. He worries about it, now and then, when he watches her playing by herself in the garden or chittering to no one on the swing set, till he’s sick with guilt and dreaming up desperate schemes to find her a friend her own age.

She loses her first baby tooth, and he makes sure that it isn’t anything like the first time he lost his. She holds it up for him to see one morning after she wiggled it out in the garden, bloody-gummed and proud as anything; and he kisses her on the forehead, and tells her he’s proud of her, and that if she tucks it under her pillow that night when she goes to sleep, the tooth fairy will leave a treat for her when she wakes up. She buzzes through breakfast, too excited for bedtime to pay much attention at all to her French toast. He is silent through breakfast, too anxious to tell her to eat her food, and he throws the uneaten scraps into the trash like he’s in a daze.

“I need something small,” he tells Colleen by way of greeting, brushing past her into the living room as soon as she opens the front door. “Morning, Danny. Do you have any children’s’ books?”

Danny looks up from where he’s clipping his toenails on the coffee table. Colleen closes the door and walks over to perch on the armrest beside her husband, arms crossed. He can feel their eyes on him as he rummages through their bookshelf, sliding books back into place as quickly as he pulls them out. “What’s the occasion?” she asks, and he can hear the sly little smile in her voice.

“She lost her first tooth.”

“Already?”

“Yes, Danny, already.” He turns from the bookshelf with a critical hum and stands there for a moment, looking around the room aimlessly, before hurrying over to a cabinet beside the couch. Colleen moves out of his way before he has to ask, leaning against the wall and looking down at him with her eyebrows quirked as he opens drawer after drawer. They smell like dust and something sweet. “Do you have _nothing—_ ”

“Forgive us, Ben, but it’s a little short notice.” She rocks back and forth on her heels, sharing a bemused grin with her husband. “We’ll be ready for the next tooth.”

“ _The next tooth_ isn’t— _ah!_ ” He holds up a little square book on tropical diseases and continental plagues. “May I…?”

Colleen tilts her head to read the title, and her lip curls. “Plagues?” she asks flatly.

“She’s four years old,” Danny agrees from his other side, the edge of a scoff catching at his voice.

“She’s going through her macabre phase,” he replies as he flicks through the pages, soft and absent-minded. A vague snide comment drifts lazily at the back of his throat, something like _yes, thank you, Danny, I’m aware of my daughter’s age_ or _you see, Danny,_ this _is why I so value your input – I’ve been_ wondering _how old she was but I was too embarrassed to ask_ , but the words trail off before they find his teeth, and he lets them go.

“Can she read ye—”

“She likes the pictures,” he says, a little too sharp and a little too sudden, whipping his head up and peering at Danny over the rims of his glasses. And there’s that failing again, that niggling little insecurity that’s all white-hot panic and grabbing hands and fear – there’s that defensiveness that he can’t quite name but that tastes so much like _what can you possibly give her?_ He turns back to the book, skin prickling with self-consciousness, and adds, more quietly, “I’ve started teaching her. She can already read most of the titles on our bookshelves. Struggles with _Qur’an_ , though.” He can feel all the questions they’re too uneasy to ask straining at the air, so he looks up again, caught somewhere between exhaustion and irritation, and says, “and, yes, I’m aware of the risks of encouraging these interests. But these plagues were centuries ago – there’s nothing to suggest there’s any sort of world worth her time beyond this Island.”

“Is there?” There’s something in Colleen’s voice that sounds like she hadn’t intended to ask the question aloud – something so quiet, and hopeful, and wondrous, and so at odds with all the fire and sharp teeth.

“No,” he replies, a little too quickly. He hauls himself to his feet with one hand on the top of the counter and tucks the book into his trouser pockets. “Thank you for the book,” he says, and dips his head and slips out the front door.

The next morning, Alex comes bounding into the kitchen, squealing about tooth fairies and black boils and doctors with long bird beaks, and he laughs along, and lifts her onto the kitchen counter with all the buttery sunlight and warmth, and listens to her excited chatter as he flips pancakes on the stove. She rests her cheek on his shoulder as she babbles, so soft and small and happy, and he smiles, and thinks, in a slow, numb, anxious sort of way, that it’s all going to end eventually, somewhere, somehow, and it’s going to be his fault. No one gets to be this happy for this long.

Alex celebrates her fifth birthday beneath the tree outside their little yellow house. All his people gather round to pay tribute to the daughter of the king, piling their offerings, their treats and books and dolls and coloured pencils, onto a table laid out on the grass. He remembers the ones who don’t bring anything.

He kneels down to hold her hair back when she blows out her candles, and smiles when she glows at the cheers and the applause, and lets her drag him around to play and explore and babble about made-up stories with dead mothers and magical jungles. He holds her over his head when she tells him she wants to know what it feels like to fly, and takes pictures, and tells her “just one more” when she fusses and tries to push the camera away. He watches from the shade as all the men with guns and the women with scars let her braid wild flowers into their hair, and smiles when it’s his turn next. No one dares tell the princess of the kingdom _no_. They all know who her father is.

He worries, sometimes, that she’ll grow up to be spoiled. Then he remembers all the things his father never gave him, all the things he was denied, all the times he was made to feel unwanted and unloved and unnecessary, and he hopes she does.

He never wants her to feel any of the things he did when he was a child.

He never wants her to feel any of the things he still feels now.

Late that night, with the cicadas chirping beyond the windows and the refrigerator humming in the background and another framed photograph on the wall by the front door, she sits on the kitchen counter, and they eat the rest of the birthday cake in the soft light from the hallway.

“Use your fork,” he tells her when she tries to pick up a chunk with her hands, voice somewhere between stern and fond.

“Bonnie never made me use a fork,” she grumbles, stabbing at the cake.

A sick, crawling jealousy threads up his throat like acid. He quirks his eyebrows, looking down at his plate with a sharp, tight smile. _Well, what do you expect?_ A nasty little voice titters in his head. _You weren’t there. They raised her. What are you to her but a pitiful little babysitter?_ “Well,” he says, chewing quickly and smiling up at her. “Bonnie isn’t a lady. Don’t you want to be a lady, Alex?”

She shrugs, rearranging her legs under her on the countertop and scraping the crumbs around the plate. The metal prongs squeal against the porcelain. “I wanna be back in the jungle,” she mumbles. “I don’t like it here.”

And he wants to say, _I know._ He wants to say, _of course you don’t_ – because she’s a wild thing, a foundling with freedom and magic and leaves in all the places that are filled with rot and rusty chains inside of him, a child borne of fear on a lonely night-time beach with the roar of the ocean in her ears the first time she heard anything at all. She’s a daughter of the forest and the valley before she will ever be a daughter of his, raised in a mythology and a religion that he is still trying to learn the rules of.

Of course, she wants to be free; it’s all she’s ever known.

Of course, she wants to be in the trees, with the monsters and the ghosts and the darkness; it’s her home.

But he’s doing the right thing for them all, and she’ll thank him for it one day.

“The jungle isn’t where we belong anymore,” is what he says instead. “Jacob has given us these houses because he wants us to be more civilised, and because he wants to help us. We don’t want to be ungrateful, do we?”

She doesn’t answer for a long moment. When she does, all she says is, “I miss the jungle.”

He leans across the countertop, arms folded over each other, and catches her eye. When she looks up, he smiles – and, finally, she smiles back. “You’ll learn to like it here, sweetheart,” he says gently. “I promise.”

It’s alright after that. He makes her hot cocoa, and lets her stay up past her bedtime even when she complains about her belly ache, and when she falls asleep, curled up against his side with the light of the black-and-white movie flickering across her, he carries her to bed in the dark, and whispers _happy birthday_ , and closes the door behind him.

He sends Bonnie to the Looking Glass.

She thanks him for the honour, and he smiles and thinks, _I hope you drown down there._

“What’s out there?” Alex asks one day, when he takes her to the sea.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” he tells her.

He doesn’t miss the disappointment on her face, or the bright, dangerous glint in her eye, or the way his stomach sinks into heavy grey lead. 

He’s as terrified of her curious spirit as he is enamoured by it.

Somewhere along the way, the fear takes over.

He shelters her, because he’s afraid.

Because he took her, and he’s so frightened that the island will take her back.

Because she’s so good, and good things don’t last.

He loads his luggage with name-brand food whenever he leaves the Island. He’s sick of pouring orange juice from those black-and-white cartons, of watching Alex shake bland, tasteless cereal from those boxes with black lines and made-up symbols.

He doesn’t bring enough back for the others, and they don’t ask him to.

There are no dumpsters to empty them into this time, so he carries them out to the jungle, past the pylons and the cameras, and pours it all into the mud. A waste, some might say. It was never theirs to have, he says, and it was mine to take away.

He finds a man sleeping rough on the streets of Mississippi. He slips a hundred-dollar bill into his pocket and trots up the steps of his hotel with his hands in his coat’s pockets and his collar turned up against the winter rain.

The next morning, the man is waiting for him on the bottom step, jacket bunched around him and fingers tucked into his armpits. “It was you, wasn’t it?” the man asks with a soft sort of frown, breath billowing around him in the cold. The tip of his nose is red and crusty. “Left the note in my pocket, I mean.”

“Would you like to give it back?” he replies dryly.

The man grins, all gentle edges and bright eyes. He wears him down with wry humour and warm smiles, and he buys him coffee from a nearby café, and sits with him at an outside table as snow falls beyond the pergola.

His name is Tom, and when they finish their coffees, he tells him of a far-away place where there is no fear and no poverty, where wounds are healed and miracles happen.

“Well, then,” Tom says, scraping the last remnants of foam from his take-away cup with a plastic spoon. “When do we leave?”

It’s a prudent measure, he thinks, to pluck dying birds from the street and offer them the world. What better way to ensure devotion than to stitch the feathers back onto their wings?

Once or twice, lying awake at the grim, starless point between night and sunrise with the golden porch light leaking in through his curtains, he thinks that the Island did the same thing to him. 

“He’s in love with you, you know,” Colleen tells him one evening, sitting beside him on his porch with a glass of gin and ice cubs in her glass. When he looks over at her with a puzzled little frown, she nods to Tom playing with Alex on the grass and sits back in her chair. He hears the ice cubes rattle as she takes a sip of her drink. “Has been since the day he stepped foot on his place.”

He doesn’t tell her that he already knows.

He doesn’t tell her that he’s been using those feelings for quite some time now.

“Well,” is all he says, and sits back beside her.

Alex grows up.

It all happens too fast. The time slips through his fingers. He can’t stop it.

She stops needing him.

And he lets go, because if he doesn’t, he’s going to lose her entirely. She begs him to let her begin her training and he holds off for as long as he can – he says _no, you’re not ready, it’s not safe out there,_ and she responds by sneaking out the window and running off after Tom and Colleen and digging hidden hidey-holes in the earth. He supposes that part must be hereditary, the wild instinct of the child of a mad woman. At first, his soldiers bring her back to him when she trails after them into the jungle and tries to convince them he said she could tag along. Eventually, he gives in – _make her feel included,_ he tells them, _but don’t teach her how to fire a weapon just yet._ She teaches herself how to make slingshots instead, just to spite him.

He lets go, because if he doesn’t, she’s going to tear herself apart to be free of him.

Somewhere along the way, he falls in love with the power.

It’s everything he never had as a child – everything that was denied him, and everything that he has ever denied himself.

It’s every beating in the dark, early hours of the morning, every night filled with fear and hurt and _not knowing_. It’s every time he tip-toed around his own home, and had his birthday turned into a funeral, and felt himself freeze when the front door opened. It’s every time he was called worthless, and stupid, and useless, every time he imagined the bus route he would take to leave Portland and counted the coins in his pockets to see if he had enough to make it, and every time he decided to stay, because of a throw-away kind word, or a mournful look; it’s every time he pictured every potential weapon in the house in case he had to fight for his life, every time he lay awake at night and dreamed of his mother reading him bedtime stories, every time he flinched at an innocent hand raised by someone he barely knew.

It’s the childhood he had stolen from him.

It’s the innocence that was drained from him the moment his mother’s heart stopped beating.

It’s all the things he’s never let himself feel, and all the ugly, terrible things he’s felt in their stead.

It means not being hurt anymore.

It means that no one ever gets to take things away from him anymore.

It means he gets to be in control for the first time in his life – in control of himself, and his decisions, and his people, and his world.

It means being special, and important, and needed.

It means he gets to have something of his own.

Jacob teaches him he was a fool for thinking he ever had any say in his own life.

He is called words like _special_ and _important_ , and he learns that wearing the crown that Jacob has given him means that he’s never in control – of himself, his decisions, his people, his world. There’s a price to pay for being king, he learns, and it comes in the form of blind devotion, and surrender, and chains knotted around his throat.

 _None of this is yours,_ Jacob whispers to him in his dreams _. You are nothing. You are only what I have given you._

_I own you, Benjamin._

_Your destiny is mine._

_Your life is mine._

_Your people are mine._

_You are mine._

_You belong to me._

He learns what it is to be a pawn in a game far greater than his own life, and he learns that being special tastes a little like resentment, and that being important is just a nicer name for being owned, and that _choice_ is a pretty little word that doesn’t exist.

He supposes he’s never meant to be free. There’s always going to be someone else with their hands around his neck, and there’s always going to be the bitterness creeping up his throat and mingling with all that old, primal fear.

Jacob, he learns, is really no different to his father; the abuse just comes with a gentler voice.

He supposes he’s always been too forgiving for his own good.

He waits for his mother to visit him again, to tell him she’s proud of him, that’s he’s doing the right thing, that she’s there.

And waits.

And waits.

And waits.

Alex grows disillusioned with him, just as he once grew disillusioned with Richard. He feels it happen. He flounders to stop it, tries to trap her in an hour glass while the sand slips between his fingers, makes a fool of himself trying. Movie nights. Baby photos. Picnics in the jungle.

It doesn’t work.

She stops calling him dad.

He tries to win back her love with home-cooked meals and her favourite music, but she just picks at the food and says she only pretended to like those songs because he did and asks to be excused, and when he finally relents, she scrapes her food into the sink and tosses the plate in with a metallic clatter.

And, for a while, it’s tense, and it’s unpleasant, and he feels like he doesn’t even know his daughter anymore; they meet in the hallway once, when she comes out of the bathroom with steam behind her and a towel wrapped around her head, and they stare at each other awkwardly for a moment before she stomps past him and the slams her bedroom door.

For a while, it’s bad.

And then it gets awful.

She falls in love with _Karl_. They’ve known each other since childhood, of course, but the hormones have their way and suddenly it’s _love_. At first, he tries to be nice. He opens the front door, and greets Karl, and asks him if he’d like any juice, and forces a smile; and Karl is like a deer in the headlights, terrified of the father, the leader, the king – and that helps a little. Soon, Alex is the one answering the door and whisking Karl off to her bedroom, and they never want any juice, and when he tries to bring a tray of biscuits in, Alex jumps off the bed and slams the door in his face.

“Alex,” he greets her one day, when she actually comes out of her room for once to peer into the fridge, looking out over the top of a book from his desk and trying not to sound too dry or too harsh. “The door stays open.”

“Whatever.” She doesn’t look up from where she’s still staring into the fridge, dangling off the open door by one hand.

“Alex.” He closes the book and sets it down. For the first time since she was a child, his patience is almost entirely frayed.

“What, _dad?_ ” She spins around and slams the fridge door. It shakes with the force of it. Alex stares him down defiantly, arms crossed like she’s daring him to do something. And, oh, he can’t resent her for it. She’s witty, and defiant, and bold, and smart – so smart. She’s every bit as arrogant and hot-headed as she is kind. She’s always had a capacity for coldness, for manipulation, for anger – always wants to pick things apart and see what’s on the inside. He supposes she has that to show for his parenting, if nothing else.

“I’m not asking for the impossible here. I’m only asking tha—”

“Why? It’s not like we’re even doing anything.”

“But if you _were_ —”

“ _Ew,_ can we—can we talk about this later or something? Or never? He’s gonna be here any minute.”

“No, Alex, we can’t talk about this later – we’re going to talk about it now. You know what happens to women who find themselves with child – and you’re not even a _woman_ yet. You’re practically a baby yourself.” During his speech, she stalks around the little kitchen irritably, like a caged lion ready to lash out at her bars. Now she rolls her eyes and he can just see the sneer creeping over her face from where she’s turned away from him.

“I’m not a _baby_ —”

He doesn’t stop; his voice starts to raise. “You are in no pos—”

A knock on the front door. She all but runs across the room. “Yeah, okay, that’s him.”

“ _Alex_.” He’s almost shouting now.

She throws herself onto Karl and greets him with a kiss. He glares at them for a long moment before looking away. He almost misses the defiant look Alex shoots at him before she drags Karl off to her room. He doesn’t look up when the boy greets him with a wavering, “morning, Mr. Linus.” When he hears her bedroom door close, he swipes a paperweight off his desk.

When Karl leaves that evening, they have their first real fight. After that, their house is nothing but unbearable silence and tension and hurt and anger – and when it isn’t that, it’s shouting and crying and slamming doors and Alex throwing things across the room. One night, when his heart is beating itself so hard against his ribcage so hard he thinks he’s going to throw up and she says she hates him for the first time, he lets himself cry.

He tries so hard to make them all happy.

He tries to be generous.

He tries to be kind.

He tries to be good.

He tries all the simple mercies and embellished offerings he was never shown as a child.

He tries everything he can think of.

He tries to be what the Island wants him to be.

He isn’t.

The first woman dies in childbirth. The rest don’t make it that far.

 _You have done wrong, Benjamin,_ the Island whispers, for the first time in weeks.

_I’m trying. Tell me what you want. Tell me what I can do. Please._

The silence aches inside his head, and it’s almost as bad a punishment as the needless deaths. The guilt eats away at him.

 _Hubris_ , the Island hisses.

 _Progress_ , he wails back.

The will of the Island is not the will of Jacob, he learns, and he tears himself apart trying to please them both. The women keep dying. It’s his fault. He can’t stop it. He tries. _A frivolous pursuit,_ Richard calls it. _You’re wasting resources on a few deaths._

 _You call me unfit if I let them die,_ he wants to shout back at him. _You call me unfit if I try to keep them alive. What do you want me to do?_

It becomes an obsession. His mother died because he was a parasite inside her. This time, he can fix it.

The years pass and slowly, slowly, he loses himself in all the cold majesty, the mythology and fear and illusive grandeur of _Benjamin Linus_ – the boy king, the outsider, the killer, the unwanted, the tyrant chosen by a god he’s never seen.

There’s no room for emotion left in this play, on this empty stage being trodden for an audience that doesn’t care about him.

But, still, the years are peaceful, more peaceful than they have been in decades. He lets himself believe that’s because of him. People come and go, people on boats and people in balloons. Some, they keep. Some, they don’t.

“We can cut them out of the mothers,” Ethan tells him one day, standing at attention in front of his desk. There are flecks of dried blood crusting on his arms. “The odds are good.”

And, for a moment, there’s that old, boyhood horror he’s managed to swallow down and stifle and bury beneath the crown. Grief. Fear. Confusion. For a moment, he feels lost, like he’s floundering. He can feel the boy he used to be pushing back against the man he’s become. _What kind of person,_ he wails, _what kind of person—_

“Do it,” he says. His voice is cold. He tucks his hand under the desk to hide its shaking.

There’s a panic room inside the Staff, hidden behind grey lockers in a cold, lightless room. Some remnant of DHARMA’s fear and arrogance. He supposes there’s something of the sort in each of the stations, in case any of the hostiles ever wormed their way out of the jungle and in through the doors.

He tells Ethan to decorate it.

She looks just like her.

He had no control over his mother. She died. He killed her. He needed her. He was powerless.

This time it can be different.

“You’re so pathetic,” Alex spits at him. “She’s never gonna love you back, y’know. She hates you. Look at what you’re doing to her, she—”

“This is none of your concern, Alex.”

“Oh, so you’re just gonna ruin both our lives?”

She hates him.

His back starts hurting.

A spinal surgeon falls from the sky.

Jacob loves him.

He’s finally worthy.

He is saved.

There’s someone special out there, in the jungle, in the Swan, in all the places he isn’t supposed to be. The jealousy eats away at his chest at the same time that old childhood wonder glows through his veins. He hates him and he’s in awe of him.

“He’s important, Ben,” Richard tells him, in one of those rare moments nowadays when he speaks to him at all. His voice is as dull and gentle as always, but his eyes are smug.

“I thought _I_ was important.”

“Jacob—”

“Yes, well, thank you, Richard, but when Jacob decides to speak to me himself, I’ll listen to him.”

Something is ending. He can feel it. Far too much is beginning. The thought that he won’t have any part to play in it at all terrifies him. He won’t let that happen. If there’s no role for him, he’ll make one.

He watches them from the Pearl, leaning over Colleen’s shoulder.

  * _This is Michael. Who is this?_
  * _Dad?_



“How much do we wanna tell him?” she asks.

“Enough to find the decoy village,” he replies, not looking away from where he's staring at the screen. The white light is blinding.

“How do we know he won’t tell the others?”

“Because he’s a father, Colleen, and his son is asking him to save him.”

And what wouldn’t a father do for his son?

He hardly sees her anymore. When she isn’t with Karl, she’s running around where she isn’t supposed to be, where he can’t protect her, or she’s out with Tom and Colleen in the jungle, chomping at the bit and railing against the restrictions he’s set for her. _I want to do_ more, she says. She doesn’t fully realise that _more_ means stealing children from beachside camps and breaking the fingers of innocents. She’s better off with the fruitless errands, with the harmless tasks of patrols and shooting blanks.

“You still want to continue your training?” he asks one evening, walking down the hall and into the living room with a rifle from the closet in his hands. Alex has just enough time to look up from where she’s curled defensively over her journal at the dinner table before he tosses the weapon at her. He doesn’t want to know what that thing says. Before she can reply, he continues. “Tom’s leading a team out tonight. We’re expecting one of them, and I don’t think he’s going to be coming alone. It’ll be dangerous, Alex.”

Alex turns the rifle over in her hands and half rises from the chair. “You—you’re gonna let me out?” She’d almost be smiling, if she weren’t looking at him like she thinks this is some kind of trick.

He pulls the corner of his lips back in a powerless sort of expression and glances away with a half-shrug, walking over to the kitchen and taking a plate out of the cupboard above his head. “Maybe you’ll get to shoot someone with more than a _sling-shot_.”

He glances over at her, at the wide, bright eyes and mystified half-grin, and for a moment, it looks like she wants to say _thank you, daddy._ But she remembers what their relationship is now, and she remembers that she hates him, and she doesn’t.

She goes, and he spends the black hours of early morning trying to read at his desk and fretting instead, and then, when he rises to brush aside the curtain and peer out of the window for the hundredth time that night, she comes back. He’s out the front door before they’re any more than black shapes moving in the cool pre-dawn shadows.

“Well?” he asks, wide-eyed and tense. Everyone else went to bed hours ago and the yellow light bleeding out from his living room windows and open door is the only thing illuminating the darkness. He steps down from his porch and walks forward a few paces, stopping to wait for Tom to reach him beneath the lone lime tree. The night is alive with crickets.

Tom holds up a bundle of guns and his serious expression breaks into a victorious guffaw. “We got ‘em!”

“And Michael?” he prompts impatiently, glancing away from Tom for a moment to search the crowd filtering around them towards their own homes. A chilly breeze stirs the leaves of the jungle around them and makes the skin along his arms prickle.

“Danny’s taking him across to the decoy village. Don’t suspect a thing.”

He nods, half-listening and all the while searching the thinning crowd. Then he spots her, trudging into the yellow light towards home and clearly trying to avoid being seen, skirting around him with her eyes hooded and the rifle slung over her shoulder. He lets out a breath, the anxious knot in his chest beginning to untangle.

“Alex.” He catches her before she can skulk past him. “Are you alright?”

“Knocked Michael out cold,” Tom tells him proudly, clapping Alex on the back. Alex ducks her head, glowering at the ground and letting him jostle her. She tugs the rifle strap more firmly onto her shoulder, and a silly part of him thinks it might be to hide the faintest glimmer of a smile. “He’ll have one mighty headache in the morning.”

He bows his head slightly, trying to catch her eye. “I’m proud of you,” he says quietly.

“I’m going to bed.” She shoves passed him and disappears into their house.

He gazes after her, expecting her to slam the door and almost flinching more when she doesn’t. After a moment, he becomes aware of Tom watching him. He turns back, meeting his gaze with slightly hunched shoulders and silently daring him to say something. “She’ll come around,” Tom assures him, cheerful and oblivious. “She’s just goin’ through her rebellious phase.”

He looks back at him coldly. “Thank you, Tom.”

Eventually, there’s only so much they can glean from the camera feeds in the Pearl. With Ethan and Goodwin gone, he’s deaf even if he isn’t entirely blind. And he doesn’t like being left in the dark.

“Well, well—what if somethin’ goes wrong?” Tom frets, fussing over him as he slicks his fingers with mud and, with a little grimace, musses it through his hair. The bright orange shirt has already been thrown through the mud and caught on tree branches to tear little holes in it. He thinks it looks authentic enough.

Hot air balloons. Useless facts about Minnesotan life. The year he met his wife and who gave the best man speech. The colour of their living room walls. _I'm sorry, I love you Jenny, always have, always will._ He’s read more about Wayzata and helium than he ever would have liked. But it’s always fun to inhabit a new role, to try on someone else’s life. To see how far he can push a lie before it starts to come apart at the seams and bleed out.

“Bea knows the contingency plan.”

“Well, yeah, but what if—”

“Just focus on your role, Tom. I’ll focus on mine.”

He looks down at Rousseau’s trip-wire, half-concealed beneath ferns and tall grass—

And he steps into it. The net snatches up, he goes with it. The rope burns.

She doesn’t recognise him. It’s almost thrilling, walking this fine knife-point just this side of brazen. _I have your daughter,_ he wants to tell her, because it’s the closest he can get to hurting Alex. _And she doesn’t know a thing about you._

A crossbow. A feigned bid for freedom. He’s skewered through the shoulder. He almost smiles when the blood pools around the metal tip. It’s a small price to pay, and half the fun of method acting is commitment to the role. What better way to earn the twisted devotion of a healer than to put his life in his hands?

It all goes wrong, because of one stupid little mistake, one regrettable instance of short-sightedness. Because he hadn’t quite expected them to be at the point of digging up graves just yet.

But it’s alright.

It’s alright.

He doesn’t see Alex until he goes to meet them at the Pala Ferry.

They beat him because they sense something weak in him. Because they know he’ll let them. He wonders if his father sensed the same thing. He wonders if that’s _why_. But he’s used to being beaten, and a small, messy part of him craves it.

Alex hurts him because she knows she can. She shouts at him and calls him names, and they beat him and taunt him, and he takes it. He always takes it. They know they can, and they know that nothing will happen. He never bites back. He gives up trying to bond with her; she always just throws it back in his face. He supposes he deserves it.

She goes running through the jungle where it isn’t _safe_ and frees Claire from the Staff. She wreaks havoc at the airstrip, breaks Karl out of Room 23, helps Kate and James escape on the boat she isn’t even supposed to have. And every time, he can feel them watching him – wondering how he’s going to react, wondering if this is the time he’s _finally_ going to discipline her. And he doesn’t. He can’t. He asks her, “what were you _thinking?_ ” – and she replies, “oh, _I’m_ sorry, I guess I should just act more like _you_.” And what can he say to that? _Of course, you shouldn’t. Stay kind and fearless, Alex. Don’t ever be like me._

("If you're going to go running around the Island," he'd told her once, "just make sure you aren't seen." "I'm not going to be seen, Ben. I know how to hide." "We don't know what they would do if they caught you. And The Staff is a long way from help. It would be days before we even–" "I know what I'm doing." And then she gets Ethan killed. She frees Claire. Ethan had always been a little jealous of her - jealous of the girl who got to call herself the child of the one who'd half-raised him. Well, doesn't matter now. He's dead. And how can he blame she whose only crime was having a heart? Whose goodness he admires like that of a saint?)  
  
And it’s a terrible thing, being disobeyed by someone you can’t hurt. Someone you can’t lock in a cage, or brand, or have beaten, or exile, or execute. Someone you can’t punish. And so, he lets her make a mockery of him. The boss’ daughter. He lets her disobey him, and humiliate him, and hurt him, because he can’t hurt her. He can hurt the boy she loves. He can hurt the survivors she cares about. Oh, he can hurt all of them.

But he can’t hurt her.

In the end, that doesn’t matter.

Someone else does it for him.

It worked once, all those weeks ago. He’d thought it would work again. “I swear to God,” Jack had said, with that silly little shard of porcelain held at Juliet’s neck, “I will kill her.”

“Okay,” he’d replied, because he’d known the best way to make him trust her was to cast her as expendable, and it had worked. She’d been alright. She’d lived. A part of him had hated her at that point, a part of him had wanted to see what would happen if she died, what he would feel, but she’d lived.

He’d thought it would work again.

It doesn’t.

And it’s such a pitiful little moment, so meaningless and insignificant and quick. His father, that had taken so _long_ – and now here’s Alex, there one second and dead the next. It makes no sense. It should be so some colossal event, but it isn’t. She just dies, like it’s nothing. She just crumples.

She just dies.

His empire crumbles around him, piece by piece and dust to dust at first, and then in great, colossal chunks. He clings to his crown, floundering desperately. It crumbles through his fingers. He can’t stop it.

And then it’s gone forever. Gone, because it’s for the greater good, and because he was never special, and he was never important, and he was never what Jacob wanted. He moves the Island, and then he’s empty.

He can still feel Alex’s blood on his hands.

It smells like guilt.

 _Your fault._ That’s what the voices whisper in his dreams. They’re almost a comfort. They remind him of home.  
  
  
  


“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he asks Jack one day, sitting cross-legged on the dusk-soft beach with the sun setting low over the gentle waves.

“Who?”

“Juliet.”

A pause. A broken voice. “Yeah. Yeah, she is.”

“How, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“She… She… I made a mistake, and she paid the price for it.” He doesn’t have to look over to know there are tears on Jack’s cheeks. He still hasn’t answered the question. “She was trying to save us. She… died trying to do the right thing.”

Another pause. Longer this time. “I never said I was sorry.”

“Yeah, well, I got her killed.”

He supposes that’s some sort of comfort. At least he didn’t do that.

When he returns, nothing is the same. He’d thought he’d find himself again there – he thought he’d be able to slip right back into the old role of _Benjamin Linus_ who held all the puppet strings and was always ten steps ahead of everyone else. What he steps back into is a pathetic life. They’ve all moved on without him. He’s nothing there anymore. He tries to force a role for himself out of thin air. It doesn’t work.

When he finds his people again, they can’t look him in the eye. They’re embarrassed. Ashamed. Their king, on his knees. Powerless. Part of a world that no longer exists. No power, no people, no safety, no purpose – lonely, lost, afraid, useless. Usurped. He shields himself with quiet, dark sarcasm, but it feels flat and empty and scared. They don’t need him anymore. They don’t have the same concept of loyalty as outsiders like him, but he can’t fault them for that.

The Monster gives him purpose. Reason. Something to listen to and serve. He clings to it.

And then everything changes.

For seven centuries he serves as Hugo’s number two. They’re good, all those years. Peaceful. Almost happy. Fun. They mean something. For the first time, he has a friend, and even if he doesn’t deserve him, he loves him, and he heals, just a little. The Island is his home, and he loves it, and for the first time, he knows it loves him back.

He listens, sometimes, for Alex’s voice in the whispering. That old part of him, the Benjamin Linus part of him, the scared, lonely part of him, hopes he’ll hear her one day – because that’ll mean she’s still there, and he can hold onto her, and she can’t leave. The person he is now cries with relief when he realises she isn’t there.

They’re good, those years.

The Island heals. It finds its way back to what it was supposed to be – before the Monster, before the Others, before DHARMA and the military and all the people who sought to use it and contain it and exploit it and name it. It’s a thing that was never meant to be named.

The light through the leaves is softer now. The ocean is gentle. New trees grow, and old wounds grow over with golden flowers and birdsong, and the little yellow houses crumble into dust and are reclaimed once more by the tree roots and the ferns. It was never supposed to be a place of cruelty and loss. It was only ever meant to be a place of peace. Of letting go.

But he’s never been very good at letting go of things, and he can’t let go of the guilt, and the blame, and the self-hatred, and the fear. One hundred years. Two hundred years. It doesn’t go away.

And when he dies, all those years later, with the sun on his face and the breeze rustling the leaves around him and the Island whispering _it’s time; you were a loving son, you did your part, you can let go now,_ he breathes out, and it feels like relief. His last thoughts are these:

_I’m sorry._

_I hope I was enough._

_Bury me with the trees._

_Bury me with Alex._

And then he’s gone, and the world goes on, and the breeze still blows, and the birds still sing, and when the sun sets that night, there’s a second grave in the ruins of the that old fable dreamed up by scientists and dreamers so very long ago.

He wakes up.

He sits on that bench outside the church for a long, long time. They all file past, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t – Kate, Claire, Shannon, Sayid. A few smile at him. Most don’t. For some of them, it’s been decades. For others, it must feel like only yesterday. They don’t know it’s been nigh on a millennium for him, and he doesn’t tell them. He waits.

And then, there she is.

She arrives with James, and she sees him; and she tells James to go on inside, and he protests, says he doesn’t want to leave her alone with him – but she doesn’t have to ask again, and, with a last, hateful look at him, he does.

And for a long time, all they do is stare at one another. Juliet crosses her arms, like she’s still afraid, like she’s still defensive, like she’s waiting to see who will strike the first blow, and looks down at him like she’s caught on the edge of a very tired sigh. And he folds his hands in his lap, and looks up at her helplessly, and looks away, because he doesn’t get to look at her, not after what he did. He’s had long enough to think about it, long enough to hate himself for it, long enough to long and dread the day he might – just might – be able to tell her how much it haunts him. Now that he’s here, he has no idea what to say.

"I don't expect you to forgive me,” is what he says at last.

"I don't,” is what she says, and her voice is the same, that soft, quiet brand of strength. He looks up at her. She looks back. It feels like a death sentence; he waits for the executioner to let the axe fall. “But I stopped hating you a long time ago. I hope you find peace, Ben."

And he’s speechless. He stares at her, just stares at her, because he can’t believe how good she is, after everything, after all the things that would turn a lesser person to stone. He stares at her, and drowns in relief, and that’s when he realises – all this time, all those years, he’s just been waiting for this absolution. _You can let go,_ the Island had said. He feels the weight lift, just a little; feels the air, the light, that beautiful, gentle hollowness that’s too cleansed to be empty. Tears sting his eyes.

When he speaks again, his voice is a rush of disbelief and gratitude. He smiles - a small, awed, tearful thing. “Thank you, Juliet.”

She turns, and climbs the steps, and vanishes into the soft light of the church.

And he’s alone again.

He still doesn’t forgive himself. He still doesn’t think himself worthy of letting himself go into the light and find peace. He sits on that night-time bench for a long time, long after all the others have gone onto their final resting places and the light has left the church, long after the windows are once again just dark and glassy and coloured with Mother Mary and Christ on the Cross.

But he’s not alone for a terribly long time.

He still has work to do.

He waits, because this life is the one Alex deserves. She deserves to be free, to go to college and explore the world, to fall in love and watch the sunsets and live beyond sixteen. She deserves to make all the bad decisions a young adult gets to make, deserves everything wild and wonderful and real.

He takes flowers to Alex’s graduation, and he stands up and claps the loudest when she takes her scroll and moves the tassel on her cap to the other side, and their eyes meet, and she’s laughing through the tears, and he doesn’t stop clapping.

And afterwards, he finds her through the crowd, and she throws herself at him with a delighted squeal still cracked by sobs, and he holds her in a hug so tight it hurts his ribcage and hopes it makes up for all the time they lost fighting. Her hair still smells the same as it did back then, all those centuries ago.

“I’m so proud of you,” he tells her when she steps back, that huge, bright-eyed grin still on her face and his own smile shaking at the edges against the tears threatening to spill over his cheeks.

“Yeah, well.” She rolls her eyes playfully, still skittish around compliments, still so restless and self-conscious and hungry for the world. “I couldn’t’ve done it without you.”

He waits, because there’s no more Island, and there’s no more Jacob – no more destiny or fear or duty, and she gets to just _live_. He watches her grow up; helps her pack the day before she moves across the country, because she didn’t listen to him when he said she should pack a week ago and they end up laughing uncontrollably on the other side of a meltdown when Alex can’t fit half her things into her suitcase; loads her up with all the snacks she can carry on the plane and tries not to cry when she leaves the customs queue for the second time to run back and hug him and Danielle; saves each seven-page-long emails she sends home with the three dozen photos of her new life and her new apartment and her new friends in a folder titled _Alex_.

He’s there to walk her down the aisle when she marries a lovely young man named Karl, who still has trouble calling him Ben. Karl calls him in a blind panic one morning at three AM and then he’s at the airport two hours before it opens its doors so he can be there when her daughter is born. And he is, and Alex names her Emily, and he cries when he holds her. He’s there when the second is born, too, holds her hand in the delivery room because she tells the nurses he’s her father and Danielle doesn’t correct her. She names that one Juliet.

She grows up, and he grows old. His father dies. This time, he’s there to hold his hand; and after it’s all over, he’s glad he never woke him up, because any amount of personal satisfaction at having the man he once was beg for his forgiveness is worth less than the good years he got to spend with a father who loved him.

He’s there on Emily and Juliet’s first days of school, and he’s there when they lose their first baby teeth, and he’s there when they graduate. He takes a lot of photos. He’s there when Alex gets her first wrinkle, and when she gets her first grey hair, and he’s there when all the brown fades away completely. He’s there to see all the laughter leave lines, and all the adventures leave scars, and all the happiness settle over her like a second skin.

He’s there for the Christmases, and the birthdays, and the wedding anniversaries; he’s there for tears and the sleepless nights, and sometimes it’s Emily and Juliet he makes hot cocoa for when they can’t sleep, and sometimes it’s Alex. One day, when she’s seventeen, Emily brings a pretty girl home for dinner and introduces her as her girlfriend, and he gains another granddaughter.

Somewhere along the way, he wakes Leslie up. It’s good to have another person to talk to, even if they never knew each other in that other life all those years ago.

But he doesn’t wake Alex up, because she deserves every good thing he was never able to give her and every happy memory he deprived her of.

He waits, and hard as it is to watch her grow up and grow old without all those memories to bind them together, it’s better, and they make new ones. She gets to know him as the kind, gentle father he could have been, and he gets to see his daughter happy. He once knew her for sixteen years; now he gets to know her for decades upon decades, and he never stops thinking what a gift that is.

And then, one crisp October evening, when the trees are losing their leaves and the sky is golden, when he’s old and wrinkled and Emily and Juliet have left for college, he sits down with Alex on the porch, and he holds her hand, and she wakes up.

The memories flash between them like white-hot light – jungle flowers and childish laughter and feet splashing through a stream, the buzzing of the sonar fence and the metallic roar of the monster and soft yellow paint, _“what’s out there?”; “nothing you need to worry about.”_ Guns and slingshots and slamming doors. _“I hate you. I hate your guts. I wish you were dead.” “She’s not my daughter. She means nothing to me.”_ And that one, final gunshot.

They flinch away from each other at the same time, the thunder clap still echoing between them. He stares at her, panting, guilty, panicking, suddenly regretting doing anything at all – it was selfish of him, he shouldn’t have done it, he should have let her have her own happiness, she didn’t want to wake up, she didn’t ask for it, she’ll hate him, he’s ruined everything, she has a _life_ —

“Daddy?” Alex chokes out at last, sounding like that frightened, broken girl again despite all her years. She stares at him, wide-eyed and tearful; he stares back.

“Alex,” he whispers, and his voice breaks. And he waits for her to ask all those questions he never got to ask anyone – expects her to ask, _are we dead? Have we been dead this whole time? Was any of this ever real?_ But she doesn’t. She throws herself over him, and he clings to her, and she sobs into his shoulder, and he weeps into her hair as the autumn breeze washes the sweet smells of sugar and chimney smoke over them. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry.”

And they don’t leave. They don’t go to the church. They don’t move on. Because what’s waiting for them there is no happier than the life they’ve built for themselves in death. They stay there, and Alex and Karl celebrate their forty-second wedding anniversary, and she wakes up her mother, and Emily marries that pretty girl she’d brought home for dinner when they were teenagers; and now, sometimes, Alex flinches when she hears fireworks, and she doesn’t like going anywhere tropical, and she holds onto Karl’s hand extra tight – but she promises him she’s happy, and he believes it. He taught her everything she knows about lying, after all, all those years and lifetimes ago.

And then, one early morning in spring, he drifts back to sleep with the voices of his family bubbling happily in the other room like a warm lullaby, and he lets go, into eternity, and forgiveness, and peace.

**Author's Note:**

> also, i listened to this interview looong after writing the fic and now i'm a wreck because everything michael emerson said lines up so well with everything i think of ben and wrote above and i'm going to CRY. check out the transcript of the highlights if you want, my loves :') i'll be here, a mess over my fave whom i Love: [here!](https://norvicfiddler.tumblr.com/post/632951783758626816/michael-emerson-the-hatch-podcast-jul-28-2020)
> 
> <3


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